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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

A municipal hospital system’s Epic EMR install has gone dramatically south over the past two years, with four top officials being forced out and a budget which has more than doubled.

In early 2013, New York City-based Health and Hospitals Corp. announced that it had signed a $302 million EMR contract with Epic. The system said that it planned to implement the Epic EMR at 11 HHC hospitals, four long term care facilities, six diagnostic treatment centers and more than 70 community-based clinics.

The 15-year contract, which was set to be covered by federal funding, was supposed to cover everything from soup to nuts, including software and database licenses, professional services, testing and technical training, software maintenance, and database support and upgrades.

Fast forward to the present, and the project has plunged into crisis. The budget has expanded to $764 million, and HHC’s CTO, CIO, the CIO’s interim deputy and the project’s head of training have been given the axe amidst charges of improper billing. Seven consultants — earning between $150 and $185 an hour — have also been kicked off of the payroll.

With HHC missing so many top leaders, the system has brought in a consulting firm to stabilize the Epic effort. Washington, DC-based Clinovations, which brought in an interim CMIO, CIO and other top managers to HHC, now has a $4 million, 15-month contract to provide project management.

The Epic launch date for the first two hospitals in the network was originally set for November 2014 but has been moved up to April 2016, according to the New York Post. HHC leaders say that the full Epic launch should take place in 2018 if all now goes as planned. The final price tag for the system could end up being as high as $1.4 billion, the newspaper reports.

So how did the massive Epic install effort go astray? According to an audit by the city’s Technology Development Corp., the project has been horribly mismanaged. “At one point, there were 14 project managers — but there was no leadership,” the audit report said.

The HHC consultants didn’t help much either, according to an employee who spoke to the Post. The employee said that the consultants racked up travel, hotels and other expenses to train their own employees before they began training HHC staff.

HHC is now telling the public that things will be much better going forward. Spokeswoman Ana Marengo said that the chain has adopted a new oversight and governance structure that will prevent the implementation from falling apart again.”We terminated consultants, appointed new leadership, and adopted new timekeeping tools that will help strengthen the management of this project,” Marengo told the newspaper.

What I’d like to know is just what items in the budget expanded so much that a $300-odd million all-in contract turned into a $1B+ debacle. While nobody in the Post articles has suggested that Epic is at fault in any of this, it seems to me that it’s worth investigating whether the vendor managed to jack up its fees beyond the scope of the initial agreement. For example, if HHC was forced to pay for more Epic support than it had originally expected it wouldn’t come cheap. Then again, maybe the extra costs mostly come from paying for people with Epic experience. Epic has driven up the price of these people by not opening up the Epic certification opportunities.

On the surface, though, this appears to be a high-profile example of a very challenging IT project that went bad in a hurry. And the fact that city politics are part of the mix can’t have been helpful. What happened to HHC could conceivably happen to private health systems, but the massive budget overrun and billing questions have government stamped all over them. Regardless, for New York City patients’ sake I hope HHC gets the implementation right from here on in.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The reactions to Epic losing the DoD EHR contract to Cerner have been all over the place. Most of them create some simplified view of why Epic beat out Cerner. I personally think that Leidos vs IBM had a lot more to do with the DoD’s decision than Epic vs Cerner. Either way, HIStalk reported that the protest period for the DoD EHR bid has expired and so Cerner is the big EHR winner. Mr. H said that rumors have been that Cerner’s bid was $1 billion less than Epic and Allscripts and so that’s why there was no protest.

Personally, I’ve been most fascinated by the reactions to Cerner beating out Epic in this reddit thread that includes a number of current and former Epic employees. The person who started the thread conveyed many people’s reaction to the selection of Cerner over Epic:

RIP my contracting plans for the next 2+ years 🙁

No doubt, Cerner consultants are celebrating in the opposite direction along with the 30+ other partners that won the bid with Leidos, Cerner, and Accenture. I previously wrote about how many people will be required in the $4 billion DoD EHR contract.

Here are some of the other interesting reactions in the reddit thread linked above:

I don’t think this is that bad for Epic.
* The government contract likely would have significantly shifted the focus of R&D efforts for the next few years towards features that may not be in the best interest of other Epic customers.
* When the project invariably runs into issues: overbudget, overtime, stability, training, response time, upgrades, etc. Cerner will be on the hook and take the hits in the media. Much of this implementation will be handled by outside consultants so coordination will be a huge challenge for any company.

Reminds me of the post I wrote about a year ago suggesting that losing the DoD bid might be the best thing for Epic.

Some source claim the contract would have been worth $9 billion overall. Just to put that in perspective… For an Epic employee making $200k a year, $9bn would pay your salary for 45 THOUSAND years. For 5,000 employees each making $200k a year, $9bn would pay their salaries for nine years.

(Yes, I know its not that simple… just trying to put $9 billion dollars in some kind of perspective).

Point is, yes, gaining or loosing a contract for that kind of money is a very big deal for ANY company, and impacts the future of that company in a significant way.

I don’t think most of us can comprehend a billion dollars. I know I can’t. However, I agree with the point that losing the DoD EHR contract is a big deal for any company. Even with this other clarification about how much money the EHR vendor will get from the contract:

I saw estimates that the contract would be worth $9 billion over 18 years, and that Cerner was likely to get only 10-20% of it (with most of the money going to Leidos). That means Cerner is getting $50-$100 million per year. This is obviously substantial, but it’s not as impressive as the $9 billion sounds.

I’ll be interested to see if those estimates are accurate. Plus, we’ll see how much the project cost balloons over time.

This Epic employee offered an interesting concern over Epic losing the DoD contract:

As a current Epic employee, I’m more than a little concerned about how much of the current building projects and massive hiring was made under the hope/assumption that we would be awarded this contract. I think this represents a much bigger deal for Epic than what you try to wave off.

Another user offered this comment on why Epic might have lost the deal:

What everyone needs to consider is that Epic is currently working on the build for United States Coast Guard (USCG). 1.The USCG falls under the DoD in terms of rules of engagement to include use of CHCS and PGUI (USCG didn’t transition to ALHTA). 2. The Epic build is consider by most involved on this project as an Epic failure! 3. DoD know about this Epic failure and of course the decision to to choose Epic is based upon this build failure. 4. After five years of this USCG contract Epic is still trying to understand military processes.

However, I think this was the feeling for many and why many are still in shock that Cerner won the contract over Epic:

Wow, I thought Epic had that contract locked up.

Just like I’ve done with ICD-10, I chose not to try and predict what the government will do. So, I wasn’t personally surprised by the DoD picking Cerner over Epic. However, now that Cerner is chosen, I’m interested to see how this affects both companies. The last comment about Epic’s USCG implementation illustrates how challenging working with the government can be. Cerner will definitely be spending time developing some unique software and technology to meet the DoD’s unique needs.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Akanksha Jayanthi from Becker’s Hospital Review has aggregated a list of Epic purchases in 2015. The article does make the disclaimer that some hospitals and health systems have not yet disclosed the price of their Epic purchase. So, there are likely more Epic purchases. However, the Becker’s list gives you some insight into how much it costs to purchase Epic.

Partners HealthCare: $1.2 billion

Lehigh Valley Health Network: $200 million

Mayo Clinic: “Hundreds of millions”

Lahey Hospital & Medical Center: $160 million

Lifespan: $100 million

Erlanger Health System: $97 million

Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare: $54 million

Saint Francis Medical Center: $43 million

This list isn’t surprising for me. In fact, the most surprising part is that Epic would sell a $43 million implementation. That would have previously been unheard of from Epic. However, we’ve seen Epic moving slowly down the chain. I’m not sure if that’s because the top of the chain has dried up or something else, but Epic has definitely been doing smaller implementations which they wouldn’t have considered before.

What should also be noted is that many of these numbers are estimates. With projects of this size, it’s really easy for the cost of the EHR implementation to balloon out of control. In fact, the Partners HealthCare Epic implementation at the top of the list is a great example. It was originally estimated at $600 million and you can see that estimate has doubled.

When you look at these numbers, is it any surprise that investors want to take down Epic? I’d like to see a list of the Epic renewal prices. Can you imagine what the Epic renewal for Kaiser’s $9 billion Epic EHR implementation will be? That’s where the opportunity lies for someone wanting to disrupt Epic.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

We’re getting more and more stories coming out about the impact for bad that an EHR can have in medicine. Most of them have been anecdotal stories like The Old Man and the Doctor Fable and Please Choose One. However, today I came across one that talked about an overdose due to an error in the use of EHR. Here’s a summary of the discovery:

Levitt’s supervising nurse was stumped, too, so they summoned the chief resident in pediatrics, who was on call that night. When the physician arrived in the room, he spoke to and examined the patient, who was anxious, mildly confused, and still complaining of being “numb all over.”

At first, he was perplexed. But then he noticed something that stopped him cold. Six hours earlier, Levitt had given the patient not one Septra pill—a tried-and-true antibiotic used principally for urinary and skin infections — but 38½ of them.

Levitt recalls that moment as the worst of her life. “Wait, look at this Septra dose,” the resident said to her. “This is a huge dose. Oh my God, did you give this dose?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “I did.”

If you read the whole article linked above, you’ll discover that the issue happened when entering the dosage for a drug into the Epic EHR system at UCSF. I’m not here to point fingers since every case is unique and you could argue forever about whether it’s the software’s responsibility to do something or whether the person using the software is responsible for understanding how the software works. I think that’s a discussion that goes nowhere since the right answer is that both can do better.

These types of stories are heartbreaking. They even cause some to question whether we should be going electronic at all. I’m reminded of a time I was considering working at a company that did expert witness testimony for cars. One of their hypothesis was that the computers that are now found in cars will usually save people’s lives. However, in a few cases they’re going to do something wrong and someone is going to lose their life. I think that’s where we’re at with EHR software. It’s not perfect and maybe never will be, but does it save more lives than it kills?

That’s a tough question that some people don’t want to face, but we’re going to face it whether we acknowledge the question or not. Personally, I think the answer to that question is that we do save more lives with an EHR than we damage. In the case above, there were still a lot of humans involved that could have verified and corrected the mistake with the EHR. They didn’t, but they could have done so and likely do with hundreds of other mistakes that occur every day. This human touch is a great counterbalance to the world of technology.

If we expanded the discussion beyond lost lives, it would be a much more challenging and complex discussion to know if EHR makes an organization more or less productive. I believe in the short term, that discussion is up for debate. However, in the long term I’m long on the benefits of EHR when it comes to productivity.

None of this should excuse us from the opportunity to learn important lessons from the story above. We need to be careful about over reliance on data in the EHR (similar to over reliance on a paper chart). We need to make our EHR smarter so that they can warn us of potential problems like the ones above. We need EHR vendors to not let known EHR problems remain unfixed. We need a solid testing plan to avoid as many of these situations as possible from ever happening in the first place.

There’s a lot of work to do still to improve EHR. This story is a tragic one which should remind us all of the important work we’re doing and why we need to work really hard to improve it now.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Erin McCann at Healthcare IT News wrote a recent report on a McKesson EHR outage at Rideout Health after an HVAC unit burned out. In the article she also talks about the $1 billion (I love that she added the price tag) Epic EHR outage that occurred in August 2013 at Sutter Health and lasted an entire day. Plus, she mentions the IT network failure at Martin Health System in January 2014 and had their Epic EHR down for 2 days. I’m sure there are many more that were shorter or just weren’t reported by news outlets.

When I think about EHR downtime I’m reminded of the Titanic. You can invest all you want in the “unsinkable” EHR implementation and unexpected downtime will still occur. Yes, much like the Titanic that everyone thought was totally unsinkable, it now lies at the bottom of the ocean as a testament to nature’s ability to sink anything. That includes causing your EHR to go down.

Let’s say your EHR is able to have 99.9% uptime. That would feel pretty good wouldn’t it. Well, that turns out to be 8 hours 45 minutes and 57 seconds over the year. That’s still a full working day of downtime. If you expand to 99.99% downtime, that’s still 52.56 minutes of downtime. At 99.999 (Five Nines as they say in the industry) of downtime is 5.39 minutes of downtime.

The challenge is that with every 9 you add to your reliability and uptime requirements the costs increase exponentially. They don’t increase linearly, but exponentially. Try getting that exponential cost curve approved by your hospital. It’s not going to happen.

Another way to look at this is to consider tech powerhouses like Google. They have some of the highest quality engineers in the world and pay them a lot more than you’re paying your hospital tech staff. Even with all of that investment and expertise, they still go down. So, why would we think that our hospital EHR could do better than Google?

One way many organizations try to get a Google like uptime in their organizations is to use an outside data center. Many of these data centers are able to implement and invest in a lot of areas a hospital could never afford to invest in. Of course, these data centers only provide a few layers of the technology stack. So, they can minimize downtime for some things, but not all.

The real solution is to make sure your organization has a plan for when downtime occurs. Yes, this basically means you assume that your EHR will go down and what will you do? This was my first hand experience. At one point the EHR that I implemented went down. The initial reaction was fear and shock as people asked the question, “What do we do?” However, thanks to a strong leader, she pulled out our previously created plan for when the EHR went down. Having that plan and a strong leader who reminded people of the plan calmed everyone down completely. It still wasn’t fun to have the EMR down, but it was definitely manageable.

What have you done to prepare for EHR downtime? Do you have a plan in place? Have you had the experience of having your EHR down? What was it like? Are you afraid of what will happen in your hospital when your EHR goes down?

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

Recently, consulting giant Deloitte announced a new program, named “Evergreen,” designed to cut down the cost of implementing and operating hospital EHRs. Unfortunately, much of the Evergreen coverage in the health IT trade press was vague or downright wrong, as it suggested that Deloitte was actually going into the EHR business itself. The key point Deloitte sought to make — that it could implement and operate EHRs for 20% to 30% less than hospitals — did come across, but the rest was a bit jumbled.

Having spoken to Mitch Morris, global healthcare leader for Deloitte Consulting LLP, I can clarify much of what was confusing about the Evergreen announcement and subsequent coverage. Here’s some key points I took away from my chat with Morris:

Evergreen is a suite of services, not a product: Though some HIT editors seem to have been confused by this, Evergreen isn’t an EHR offering itself. It’s a set of EHR implementation and operation services provided by Deloitte Consultants. Evergreen also includes a financing scheme allowing hospitals and health systems to obtain a new EHR by making a series of equal payments to Deloitte over five to seven years. (“It’s like leasing a car,” Morris noted.) This allows hospitals to get into the EHR without making an enormous upfront capital investment over the first 18 months.

Evergreen is only offered in tandem with an Epic purchase: The Evergreen program arose from what Deloitte learned after doing a great deal of work with Epic EHRs, including the famous multi-billion install at Kaiser Permanente and an extensive rollout for large hospital system Catholic Health Initiatives. So at the outset, the program is only available to hospitals that want to go with Epic. Deloitte is considering other EHR vendors for Evergreen partnership but has made no decisions as to which it might add to the program.

Both onshore and offshore services are available through Evergreen: One might assume that Deloitte is offering lower implementation and operation costs by offshoring all of the work. Not so, Morris says. While Deloitte does offer services based in India and Ireland, it also taps U.S. operations as needed. Clients can go with offshore labor, onshore labor or a mix of services drawing on both.

This is a new application services management offering for Deloitte: While the consulting giant has been managing Oracle and SAP installations for clients for some time, managing EHR platforms is a new part of its business, Morris notes.

According to Morris, Deloitte expects Evergreen customers to include not only health systems and hospitals that want to switch EHRs system-wide, but also those which have done some acquisitions and want to put all of their facilities on the same platform. “It’s expensive for a health system to maintain two or three brands, but they often can’t afford the upfront capital costs of putting every hospital on the same EHR,” he said. “We smooth out the costs so they can just make a payment every month.”

This could certainly be a big score for Epic, which is likely to scoop up more of the EHR-switching systems if Deloitte helps the systems cope with the costs. And Deloitte is likely to get many takers. Let’s see, though, whether it can actually follow through on the savings it promises. That could change the EHR game as we know it.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I was particularly interested in the most recent post about how to find Epic customers. Once someone’s non-compete is over with Epic, it’s good to know which hospitals and organizations are available to those with Epic experience. As the owner of Healthcare IT Central, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point you to this list of Epic Jobs. However, depending on where you live or where you’d like to live, it might be helpful to know what hospital organizations have implemented Epic.

In the article linked above, they offer an interesting way to figure this out:

One…comment on a nursing blog said this:
“you can download an app in your iphone “mychart” it will show you the states that have EPIC program”

The MyChart app is available on Android now, and it lists each organization by the state that they serve.

If it’s full time work you want, start your job search with a trip to the app store of your choice.

I like the creative way to find out where Epic is installed. I imagine that not all 100% of Epic users are on MyChart, but thanks to meaningful use I bet it’s pretty close.

In this recent Nextgov article, they talk about what Team IBM/Epic are doing to prepare for the massive bid:

On Wednesday, IBM and Epic raised the bar in their bidding strategy, announcing the formation of an advisory group of leading experts in large, successful EHR integrations to advise the companies on how to manage the overhaul — if they should win the contract, of course.

The advisory group’s creation was included as part of IBM and Epic’s bid package, according to Andy Maner, managing partner for IBM’s federal practice.

In a press briefing at IBM’s Washington, D.C., offices, Maner emphasized the importance of soliciting advice and insight from the group. Members of the advisory board include health care organizations, such as the American Medical Informatics Association, Duke University Health System and School of Medicine, Mercy Health, Sentara Healthcare and the Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Epic President Carl Dvorak explained the early move will also help test the performance of an Epic system on a data center and network that meets Defense Information Systems Agency guidelines for security. An IBM spokesperson told FCW that testing on the Epic system has been ongoing since November 2014.

As we noted in our last article, 2015’s going to be an exciting year for EHR as this $11+ billion EHR contract gets handed out. What do you think of Team IBM/Epic’s chances?

Interoperability; Some vendors have the unmitigated gall to try and keep their systems proprietary. When they refuse to make code or training available to others, competition will have difficulty achieving interoperability and customers will not be able to move too far from the vendor and their own profitability is secured. Competition is greatly reduced. Capitalism at its finest.

A long, long time ago in a land far away, 4 vendors in the minicomputer and PC markets attempted to do just about the same thing. Wang, Data General and Digital Equipment were almost totally proprietary. Interoperability was little more than a dream. Proprietary would secure success. The fourth company was the leader in the PC world. They also were not able to communicate with competitors and vice versa. For years, IBM compatible meant the difference between success and failure. Why? Try profit. If you control a market and can keep others away, profits remain high. After a time, as with IBM there will come a time that giving up the proprietary nature of the product will cause an increase in sales and profits.

Throughout the 80’s and 90’s IBM’s competitors and some large users complained bitterly about all four company’s proprietary nature. The 3 minicomputer companies “bet the farm” that they could succeed by being proprietary. IBM did the same. The rest is history. One won and three lost.

Epic is in the same boat as those four. Being proprietary is increasing their profitability currently. As time progresses will Epic decide that the time is right to allow the competition access to their product and code and, like IBM, will they do it at the right time to remain the market leader. Any bets?

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Many of you probably remember that we helped promote an Epic Salary Survey. As promised, they’ve published the results of the survey and we thought that many readers would be interested in the Epic Salary survey results.

The survey had 753 responses. Not bad for an online survey that was promoted across various blogs and social media outlets. Although, as you can imagine, some states are better represented than others. It’s the challenge of having 50 states.

This is my favorite chart from the Epic salary survey results (you can download the full survey results and data by states here):

As I look at some of these salaries, I’m reminded of the doctor who said that they shouldn’t be spending time learning their EHR. The hospital CFO then told the doctor, “I’m sorry, but that Epic consultant costs a lot more than you.”